On August 31st 2022, I uploaded a work of art to a form that my employer, Meow Wolf, had circulated to collect examples of its staff’s creativity, for showcasing as part of an artist appreciation initiative.
It’s not my general practice to comment on my own work, but the piece, which I conceived in January 2022, needs some context because of – as Harold Macmillan famously said – ‘events’.
I will shortly publish the work, which is called LET THAT SINK IN, and which is accompanied by a piece of creative writing with the same title, on various web3 platforms.
Here follows a brief chronology of the conception and development of the work, to show that it was well-advanced – indeed, nearly finished – before a certain billionaire brought fresh notoriety to the phrase ‘let that sink in’ after he acquired Twitter in November 2022. My work preceded that moment, and accordingly is not meant to capitalise on the billionaire’s fame.
The phrase ‘let that sink in’ first caught my eye as I was perusing the News Literacy Project’s one-page sheet on misinformation, which it had produced for National News Literacy Week, which ran January 24 - 28, 2022. I thought ‘let that sink in’ would make a perfect title for the debut work of a new literary form I had conceived, which I call the ‘psest’.
I have a good understanding of the web’s ephemeral nature, so checked whether the sheet had been saved to the Wayback Machine at archive.org. Turns out it was saved twice, on the 28th and 29th of January. Here is the link where both saves may be found:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://newslit.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Misinfo_inBrief_NNLW.pdf
After landing at the Wayback Machine, click either save instance to see the News Literacy Project’s document; then look for the section at top-right called ‘Red flags’. ‘Let that sink in’ is listed in the section as one of the danger phrases signaling misinformation. (The billionaire’s use of the phrase thus came laden, for me at least, with rather delicious irony.)
A few days later, on February 3rd 2022, I got around to journaling the idea in the digital notebook where I keep such things. Here is a screenshot of the note’s history, showing when I first recorded the phrase:
Between then and August, I focused on the visual art element of the work. By August I had produced twelve images to publish as NFTs, plus one sample image, which is the one I uploaded via Meow Wolf’s form.
For this chronology, I asked a person at Meow Wolf with access to the form to send me the details of my entry. Here is a screenshot of their email to me:
From the screenshot, you can see my colleague copy/pasted the row of the spreadsheet created by the form containing my entry, which includes the timestamp Aug 31st 2022, 5:42pm, and the title of the work, ‘Let That Sink In (Lit Art No. 0.1)’. My colleague also attached the work itself to their email (a crop of which I’ve used for this essay’s cover image).
To accompany this piece of visual art, I also submitted a brief comment via the Meow Wolf form:
This is part of a WIP that involves creating literary art for consumption in both new and non-literary ways. This particular element speaks to literature's power to highlight and counter misinformation. The idea is to create a visual experience uncanny enough for its textual components to imprint in the viewer's mind, so that when they encounter the words again, their processing of these words will be mediated somewhat by an experience – the previous viewing of the art – that does not correspond to what they're being told. The work in its current form is thus meant to run interference on cognitive processes that are too accepting of the kinds of emphatically-relayed statements that are all too common in today's social discourse. In its final form the piece will take on further meaning as a literary work in its own right.
Later, during a video call with another colleague who had access to a backup copy of the form, I asked them to share it to their screen so I could get a screenshot of the timestamp. In this case, the screenshot also includes my accompanying comment; and the timestamp (at bottom right) is the same as the one in my other colleague’s email:
(That’s me in the screenshot.)
All this to say, there are several people who can independently verify that my LET THAT SINK IN project had reached a mature stage by August 2022, and so those interested in my work can rest assured that it’s not an opportunistic reaction to a billionaire’s utterance. I got there before he did.
Finally, some might ask – Why has it taken me so long to make public a project I started at the beginning of the year? The answer is: essentially, I’m extremely slow. For LET THAT SINK IN, I created twelve pieces of visual art to publish as NFTs; wrote an essay explaining how the new literary form of the psest works; and also wrote a piece of creative writing to accompany the visual art, which when combined with the latter makes a psest. All of these items need to be published more or less in concert, so they each have had to wait for the others’ completion.
Finally, I also had to produce this chronology, which I am publishing before the other elements of the project, so I can link back to it, should any questions about the provenance of my ideas and work arise.
—@benrwms, December 2022
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